A Gigapan pro bot should do the trick quite nicely....especially if Gpixel pano's of the non spherical variety are your piece of cake...spherical and the Gigapan is sort of a no no, since it can't reduce the number of shot in the nadir/zenith region. I would check wether I could use my 300 F4 in the portrait position though (physical I mean, since shooting portrait is advisable in order to minimize stretching). I would advise against a Panogear since you more then likely would have to modify it to get the lens in the NPP (No Parralax Point) which can be important at times (if some foreground (like an antenna or a lightmast) blocks some of the view since that will throw APP of kilter.

And of course you can also shoot GPixel pano's using a manual adapter like the Nodal Ninja 5 with RD16 that wil give you 3.75 degree steps but then you would be limited to not using a 450 mm lens (the 300 will turn into a 450 on a DX Nikon). If you would use the lens on a 24 Mpixel D600 you could go with the mannual option. And in this case a 12 x 6 grid gets you 1.05 Gpixel...

And for the Gigapan you'll need a Nikon 10 Pin adapter cable....at least that is what their site states.

Artisan S. wrote:A Gigapan pro bot should do the trick quite nicely....especially if Gpixel pano's of the non spherical variety are your piece of cake...spherical and the Gigapan is sort of a no no, since it can't reduce the number of shot in the nadir/zenith region.

Quite - it's not too good for 360 HFOV panos either.

Price-wise the Gigapan Pro sits somewhere between the Panogear system, and the Seitz VRDrive 2 and the Panoneed, but is not as versatile as any of them. It is designed to shoot partial panos only - panos with a pano FOV of less tan 360x180 - by shooting a regulkar grid of images. If that meets your needs then that's fine.

The Panogear, Seitz VRDrive 2 and the Panoneed can all record shooting positions and that data can then be used by APP/APG (via their repscetive Import filters) to assist the stitcher in placing images that lack features for automatic control point detection (plain blue sky shots for exaxmple) which might otherwise be left out of the stitch. The Gigapan series of robotic panoheads can't do that, they can only shoot a regular grid in a limited number of patterns and that 'information' can be used by the Giagapan Stitcher and APP/APG (via the Gigapan Import filter) but it's not as 'clever' as using shooting position recorded data.

I would check whether I could use my 300 F4 in the portrait position though (physical I mean, since shooting portrait is advisable in order to minimize stretching).

The Gigapan series of robotic heads is designed to mount the camera/lens only in landscape orientation, as far as I know. And the Gigapan Stitcher software and the Gigapan Import 'filter' in APP/APG assumes landscape orientation of the images.

..............

Be aware that the shooting of gigapixel images using a robotic pano head is in many ways the easy bit. The stitching and post-processing can be very challenging and requires considerable computing power, not to mention a lot of patience.

How much RAM do you have in the computer you want to proces the pnorama on?

Regards, Hans KeesomI stitch and render for other photographers. Price: 25 euro or less, no cure no pay. If you want to concentrate on your business let me do the stitching for you. Free TB of Dropbox space when you have more then 250 euro business a year.

Andrews hint about memory and gigapixels and budget is a serious one.just follow Hans' yesterday posting. here only a 300 image panos he calculates a need of 25GB RAM to have an optimum RAM, so if you only have 12GB RAM instead this means waiting x times morewaiting instead of fluent 2 hour render...

tamiro wrote:if the panogear can work with the D300s+ a 300 mm lens that good for me

(i wood like to calibrate the equipment to the NNP)

I've no idea what the NPP for a 300mm lens on a D300S would be.

But I doubt very much that you could mount this combination at the NPP on a Panogear mount.

Whether you couild do so on any of the robotic pano heads we've mentioned I don't know.

Unless you have some subjects in a (distant landscape) scene closer than about 100m then it's generally not considered important to mount the camera lens at the NPP because parallax will not be an issue.

It's said to be more important to mount the camera/lens close to the centre of mass to ease the load on the tilt/pitch motor and gears.

Regards, Hans KeesomI stitch and render for other photographers. Price: 25 euro or less, no cure no pay. If you want to concentrate on your business let me do the stitching for you. Free TB of Dropbox space when you have more then 250 euro business a year.

Artisan S. wrote:(physical I mean, since shooting portrait is advisable in order to minimize stretching).

No. The reason is: you need fewer moves vertical because of a wider vertical fov in portait-mode. ThatÂ´s all.Landscape-mode on the other hand has advantages in dealing with moving clouds and such things. here you need fewer moves horizontally becaus of a bigger fov horizontally.

Basically the portrait mode come from the tradition of manual heads - where horizontal you have click-stops but vertical itÂ´s more complicated to move.So here the portait-mode definitely has the advantage of fewer movings.

best, Klaus

Last edited by klausesser on Wed Dec 05, 2012 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

mediavets wrote:I've no idea what the NPP for a 300mm lens on a D300S would be.

Depends on the length of the tube. But you rarely would need to really match the NPP.

mediavets wrote:Whether you couild do so on any of the robotic pano heads we've mentioned I don't know.

You can.

mediavets wrote:Unless you have some subjects in a (distant landscape) scene closer than about 100m then it's generally not considered important to mount the camera lens at the NPP because parallax will not be an issue.

It's said to be more important to mount the camera/lens close to the centre of mass to ease the load on the tilt/pitch motor and gears.

I definitely agree. But you also need perfect matching the NPP if you shoot close-ups of paintings.HereÂ´s one shot using a 85mm: www.360impressions.de/MKPBild1 (test-version - the frameÂ´s shadow needs to be softened).The NPP needed to be carefully matched - if i had used a 300mm matching would have been very much more critical

How much RAM do you have in the computer you want to proces the pnorama on?

im going to by a new computerwith win 7 64 bitI 7SSDand 16 GIGA of RAM

but that not the issue here

I advice to make sure more GB of RAM can be installed in future.

Regards, Hans KeesomI stitch and render for other photographers. Price: 25 euro or less, no cure no pay. If you want to concentrate on your business let me do the stitching for you. Free TB of Dropbox space when you have more then 250 euro business a year.

klausesser wrote:But you also need perfect matching the NPP if you shoot close-ups of paintings.HereÂ´s one shot using a 85mm: www.360impressions.de/MKPBild1 (test-version - the frameÂ´s shadow needs to be softened).